Science Fiction

By Gerald Jonas

Published: November 2, 1997

The uses of science fiction are many. The same tricks of the trade that animate so many whiz-bang genre stories -- the futuristic settings, the hardware of space travel or time travel -- also provide a ready-made framework for the modern novel of ideas. Because it gives writers the freedom to invent and populate entire societies, even worlds, science fiction has become the natural home of the anti-utopia -- the cautionary novel of ideas as practiced in this century by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.

Michael Kanaly, the author of THOUGHTS OF GOD (Ace, paper, $12), revels in the freedom of science fiction. His title, to begin with, is literal. In passages that bring new meaning to the phrase ''omniscient narrator,'' Kanaly offers the reader copious transcriptions from God's diaries -- or, to be more exact, God's lab notes, since the cosmos turns out to be a vast laboratory for testing certain hypotheses about the creation of a good society.

On most worlds, it seems, the experiment is going badly. A kill-or-be-killed mentality, necessary for survival during the primitive hunter-gatherer stage of evolution, remains stronger than the impulses toward cooperation and compassion. Nowhere is this truer than on Earth, where the main action of the book takes place. Even the ''spiritual entities'' implanted as a kind of moral leavening in the dominant primate species sometimes turn senselessly violent.

Kanaly's unblinking eye focuses on a duel between two modern-day hunters, Dennison York, who tracks down violent criminals the police cannot catch, and Arnie Watts, a serial killer with no redeeming traits. Whereas another writer in another genre might advance psychological or sociological explanations for Arnie's terrible deeds, the apparatus of science fiction allows Kanaly to take the long, long view -- which comprehends a kind of New Age theology big enough to make room for the presence of evil with a capital ''E.''

This is not a likable book. Kanaly's insistence on getting inside the killer's head becomes unbearable at times, as does the divine detachment of the cosmic observer, whose research protocols would be swiftly rejected by the ethics committee at any university. Yet the relentless alternation between serial killer and Serial Experimenter builds up a charge of tension that is impossible to ignore or forget. If the purpose of a novel of ideas is to force us to think about things we would rather not face, then ''Thoughts of God'' is a success.

THE PHYSIOGNOMY (Avon, paper, $12), by Jeffrey Ford, is a modern allegory in the manner of Franz Kafka's ''In the Penal Colony.'' The main characters have names like Cley, Below and Corporal Matters. As Master of the ''Well-Built City,'' Drachton Below lives for power alone. One of his willing accomplices is Physiognomist First Class Cley, who can read subversive thoughts in the curve of a man's cranium.

Cley lives for his work, in which he takes great pride: ''I am a man of science. I probe gently with an educated touch. If I am forced to delve into the topography of your private areas, I will do so wearing a leather glove. My instruments are so sharp that even if they do happen to nick you, you will not discover the cut for hours.'' He has no private life, unless you count his addiction to ''sheer beauty,'' a drug that produces dreams indistinguishable from reality.

The world of the Well-Built City shares no discernible border, in space or time, with our own. Cley's painful progress from zealous torturer to selfless rebel follows a logic of its own. He loses faith in his science, betrays the one person who touches his heart, does penance on a prison island under the diabolical Corporal Matters and returns to the Well-Built City intent on subverting the Master and restoring the world to a semblance of natural order.

Ford writes equally well about the scientific cult of precision and the acceptance of ambiguity. You don't have to embrace his antiscience message to appreciate the care and skill that went into its framing.

SIGNS OF LIFE (St. Martin's, $21.95), by M. John Harrison, derives much of its strength from its equivocal relationship to modern science fiction. The setting is England today. Isobel Avens, ''slow, heavy-bodied,'' dreams of learning to fly. She falls for Mick Rose (known as China) because he tells her he is a pilot. This is a lie. Actually, he and his partner, Choe (rhymes with ''Joey''), run a delivery and removal service that specializes in medical waste and even less mentionable goods; since their unspoken motto is ''Don't ask, don't tell,'' they do a thriving business.

Choe, a motorcyclist with a short attention span, sums up his philosophy of life in a phrase: ''The idea is not to slow down.'' He spends all his spare time fighting boredom. China, who lets Choe jerk him around, cares about nothing except staying close to Isobel, with whom he is irremediably in love. Only Isobel has a clear goal. She wants to fly. Yet for reasons she is not called upon to explain, she makes no move to learn.

Many pages go by, filled with puerile if dangerous escapades whose very point seems to be their pointlessness. Then one day Isobel leaves China for Brian Alexander, a cosmetic surgeon whose brochure promises: ''We use the modern 'magic wand' of molecular biology to insert avian chromosomes into human skin-cells. . . . Our client chooses any kind of feather, from pinion to down, in any combination.'' The feathers are purely decorative. But Isobel persuades the doctor to raise his sights. This is apparently what she has been waiting for: not to pilot a plane but to become a bird. She returns from Dr. Alexander's clinic in Miami with real wings and a heart that beats 300 times a minute. When her abused body rebels, she turns to China for help.

To my mind, this sudden leap into science fiction -- the revelation of feathers and wings and altered metabolism -- changes the entire trajectory of the novel. Ursula Le Guin has said that one of the virtues of science fiction is its ability to make metaphors literal. Once Isobel's dream of flight enters the realm of (fictional) possibility, the reader sees her in an entirely different light. What had seemed aimless now seems purposeful; what had seemed foolish now seems brave, even heroic.

Harrison's quirky narrative strategy makes sense, if only in retrospect. Everything that happens to Isobel and her tiresome friends before the transformation is prologue, intended to heighten the impact of her decision and its aftermath. Readers who stay the course may be astonished at how much pity and sorrow Isobel's fate evokes.